Bonsai is good software.
The proposal flow is clean. The contracts are solid. The tax tooling is better than most accountants will give you. If you're a freelancer sending proposals and invoicing one or two clients at a time, it's hard to beat.
But Bonsai isn't an agency tool. It was built for a team of one, and the seams show the second a second designer joins.
What Bonsai nails
The solo loop:
- Lead comes in.
- Send a proposal.
- Get it signed.
- Track your time.
- Invoice.
- Repeat.
Bonsai maps to this perfectly. Templates, automations, an interface that stays out of the way. A CRM that doesn't feel like a CRM. Expense tracking wired into tax prep. For a team of one, that loop is the business.
If you're solo, stop reading. Use Bonsai.
What happens when you hire your second designer
Your bill goes from $25 to $50/month. Still fine. You set them up, assign a project, go back to work.
Two weeks in:
- You're reviewing their work over email. Bonsai has no design review.
- You're on Slack to coordinate. Bonsai's messaging is client-facing only.
- Three projects are running in parallel. You don't know who's loaded, who's free, or what's on fire.
- Your old freelance clients loved the portal. Your new agency clients are confused by it.
None of this is Bonsai's fault. It wasn't built for this. Solo-to-agency isn't a feature gap. It's a different product.
Four things that break between 3 and 5 people
1. Review cycles. Solo review is a PDF and an email reply saying "change the blue." Team review is three stakeholders, two rounds, and someone working off V2 while the client is looking at V4. Bonsai has no review tools. You end up bolting on Filestage ($25/mo) or living in "V3_final_FINAL.pdf" threads. Oase has pin-annotated reviews built in — clients click the exact spot and leave feedback, AI summarizes the round.
2. Team coordination. Bonsai's messaging is client-only. No internal team chat. Agencies on Bonsai end up running Bonsai + Slack + Email + Filestage + Google Drive. Five tools, five places information lives. Your new designer can't find the brief, so they DM you. You become the router.
3. Workload visibility. Bonsai's workload views are tasks-per-person. What agencies actually need to know is: is this project healthy? Oase scores project health 0-100 across six factors — budget burn, timeline, review cycles, client responsiveness, team load, scope drift. Answers "what needs my attention this week" in ten seconds.
4. Client experience. Freelancer clients want a contract and an invoice. Agency clients want a portal — their logo, their colors, their subdomain, their requests, their reviews, their invoices, in one place. Bonsai's portal is fine. It's not yours.
The pricing math nobody does upfront
A 5-person studio on Bonsai:
- Essentials: $25/user × 5 = $125/mo
- + Filestage (no design review built in): +$25/mo
- + Slack (no team chat built in): +$40/mo
- Or jump to Premium for Gantt + white-label: $39/user × 5 = $195/mo
- Or Elite (3-user minimum): $59/user × 5 = $295/mo
Realistic case: $260/mo. Elite case: $295+/mo before any add-ons. Every new hire: +$25 to +$59.
Oase Pro: €49/mo (annual) flat. 6 staff, unlimited clients. Design review, team chat, 57 creative tools, AI assistant, client portal, invoicing, quotes — all in.
Oase Agency: €99/mo (annual). Unlimited staff.
You hire without opening the billing page.
Where Bonsai still wins
- US tax prep built in. We don't do tax.
- Contracts-with-e-signatures as the core workflow. If you're a consultant, Bonsai's contract tooling is more mature than ours.
- Full CRM with deals pipeline. Ours is lighter.
- You genuinely want per-user pricing. Our model doesn't flex that way.
If any of those are core to your business, use Bonsai. Honestly.
The positioning, in one line
Bonsai helps you send proposals. Oase helps you deliver projects.
As you grow, the center of gravity moves from the first to the second.
What to do next
If you're solo, close the tab.
If you're 3-15 people and feeling the seams — review by email, three tools duct-taped together, no clear view of project health — we built Oase for this moment. Free plan. Run one real project through it, brief to invoice.